The Prodigy Project
Being a child prodigy does weird things to you. Your sense of perspective gets messed with constantly as soon as the label is attached to you. Once you're old enough to realize what it means, it's an unending tug-of-war for your identity. Parents often have it worse. My parents went way into debt to enroll me in an elite college prep boarding school, you know, the kind where future Senators and military flag officers go. The kind where the campus looks like Texas A&M and the extra-curriculars include a summer glider school. The kind where you have to be careful to even admit you went to depending on the crowd. My specific area of "prodigy" was art, though I was always one of those kids who sped past their peers academically in almost all subjects (in my case, chemistry was my weak point. I didn't and still don't get it at all.) I was on the debate team, chess club, etc. My parents wanted to send me to a conservatory, though that would mean even more debt. I realize I haven't exactly painted a picture that invites pity, but in retrospect I don't think all the pressure was good for me. It certainly wasn't good for my parents. I suppose in the end it all worked out for the most part, but there's one experience from this setting that makes me uncomfortable to think about to this day. Junior year was the point where all the students at my school were supposed to start finalizing our goals for the future. We spent a lot of time meeting with college and company recruiters. During that time we were also bombarded with notices of various opportunities related to our specific skill sets. I was given a lot of fliers for various summer art programs, for example, and we all got materials for various "leadership" programs of the type that cater to rich kids. It was in this hyper-competitive environment that I was introduced to the Zodiac Institute. When the juniors were invited to take a "personality test"after school I almost didn't find it worth my time. I was juggling a lot of these different "opportunities" and I horded every moment of free time I could get after school. But the constant pressure I was under to excel demanded that I never let a chance at success pass me by, so I decided to see what this personality test was all about. So I got the test proctored for me at our testing center (yes, our high school had a large exam center of the kind normally only found at colleges). Of course, it turned out to be more than a personality test, it was a full intelligence test in all but name. It was stranger than an IQ test or SAT, however. Questions involved math problems where the rules of arithmetic were change upfront, short essay questions that involved interpreting very obscure literary themes, and visual puzzles that literally hurt to look at. It was all so weirdly esoteric that I finished the test convinced I had done very poorly. There were a fair number of normal personality and career interest questions as well, though. Well, normal except for the fact that the questions tended to envision loftier goals than a normal career interest inventory would.